Lady Gaga Wants to ‘Push The Envelope’ at Super Bowl

Lady Gaga entered a new era of her career with her rock-leaning single “Perfect Illusion,” but she revealed that her new album Joanne will be influenced by a wide variety of genres.

“The album has a lot of different vibes on it,” she told Carson Daly on 97.1 AMP Radio. “There’s country, there’s folk on it, there’s dance on it, funk, there’s rock, there’s a lot of pop…pop songs with all these different influences of music.”

“What I wanted to do was bring all different types of people together, that love different things,” she continued. “And have somebody that didn’t think they could normally be friends with somebody that loves country music be friends with them.”

Joanne was inspired by Gaga’s late aunt, who passed away from lupus in 1974.

“I thought if she was still here, what would she have to say? And the truth is, she wouldn’t be on her cell phone and she wouldn’t be worried about what anybody thought of her, or on the internet all day. She would be looking around at life because she didn’t get to live it. The spirit of Joanne came through me in every song, so that’s what this album is about. It’s a lot about human connection and you can hear it through the music.”

Lady Gaga will take her new music to arguably the biggest stage in the world, the Super Bowl halftime show, but first, she’s embarking on a mini-tour of dive bars around the country.

On Wednesday, she will travel to Nashville to perform in a mystery dive bar. Bud Light will live stream the event on its Facebook page, along with her two other performances on October 20 and 27.

“When you play in a big arena—which is wonderful—or in a stadium, I’ve done that before a lot too and it’s just an incredible and amazing rush, it feels good for you as a performer, maybe, but for the audience, they’re a lot farther away from you,” she explained. “Dive bars, by the way that I grew up in New York when I was 19 on the Lower East Side, everybody had a production. It’s intimate, but you also have to think of things that are simple on your own and it requires using your mind on a small stage. I want people to show up and see something very big in a very small place.”

The 30-year-old artist isn’t revealing much about her plans for the Super Bowl quite yet, but she did divulge she’ll be bringing some special to-be-announced guests on stage with her.

“The best way to push the envelope is with your guts and your talent,” she said of her vision for the career-defining performance. “And then you also want to push the envelope in terms of your creativity and your music and taking the show to the next level, but I don’t know if it’s the place to push the envelope in other ways. In some ways, I want to lightly lick the envelope, hop inside, close it, write my name on it, and the thing is that I really just want to be there for football fans because that’s what I’m hired to do.”

But don’t expect Gaga to be rooting for any one team once February rolls around.

“I think this is a good time for me to be like Switzerland in all of this and be quite neutral about football. I will say that I grew up—my mom is from West Virginia—and so I grew up with a household of yelling Steelers fans and I’m very happy about that. But my position is to not be fighting for one team over the other.”